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Top positive review

5.0 out of 5 starsOne of the best NAS devices on the market today. Good for pros and beginners.

Reviewed in the United States on September 9, 2016

I’ve just spent 40+ days putting the PR4100 through its paces in a good variety of tests including basic NAS functions (with comparisons to similar Synology devices), transcoding stress tests, power failure simulation, simulated drive failure recovery, formatting and RAID changes, connecting from Macs (including Time Machine), PCs and iOS devices, moving massive amounts of data to and from the device using a variety of methods (RSYNC, FTP, WD myCloud), testing the apps, etc.

The ‘too long, didn’t read’ version: Western Digital has put together an extremely solid NAS offering that should sit at the top of any home and/or small business’s shopping list. Strengths include serious streaming horsepower, ease of use, and Western Digital reliability and reputation. It’s not completely up to Synology’s level in terms of features and apps (yet), but the hardware transcoding is the best I’ve ever seen and my bet is this platform is going to get continue to evolve. If I had to buy a new NSA today, it would be a seriously tough call and the transcoding might be the deciding factor.

Quick Review Note: I was offered a 32TB version of the PR4100 for review and was sent a 16TB version. This has no effect on anything in my review, but felt like I should note it anyway.

Setting up the PR4100 is cake! It comes out of the box ready for action… slide the drives in, plug it in to a reliable UPS, hit the power button and navigate to the local IP to start setup.

The PR4100 has tons of config options, and you can get as detailed as you’d like. I chose to go take a few extra minutes and get some of the basic setup tasks out of the way to make using the NAS easier by creating volumes I wanted to use to segregate files and people, creating user accounts, enabling cloud file access for myself, making sure basic security was adhered to (changing default ports, etc.), switching on SSH and FTP, giving the NAS a reservation on my home network (powered by Eeros), etc.

All-in I spent about 15 minutes looking through options and getting it ‘just right’. For many, many users of this NAS, you can skip much of what I did since most of the default config options are good enough to get novice users going quickly.

One commenter mentioned needing to change the PR4100 to RAID5 from RAID0. I didn’t not have to do this, mine came out of the box in RAID5. For those of you who don’t want to learn about RAID setups, just make sure your NAS (if it’s the PR4100) is set to RAID5. This will ensure you get plenty of drive space (3 of your 4 drives added together is how much space you’ll have) and that if a drive goes bad you can swap it out and not lose data.

Also, RAID is not a backup strategy. If you have a NAS, it still needs to be backed up! You can do this with multiple services today… I am doing a simple over-the-internet backup to Amazon S3. It’s not fast, but it works flawlessly (and in the background) and ensures my NAS is completely backed up in case of fire/flood/etc. If you want to set this up and are unsure how, leave a comment and I’ll see if I can’t help you.

We have Macs in our house (aside from one lonely PC), and the PR4100 accepted TimeMachine backups from both of them without breaking a sweat. With this much space, this thing is the ultimate TimeCapsule for Apple laptops. With WD’s app, you can also backup photos from your iOS or Android right to the PR4100 - pretty cool stuff.

The WD app is also easy to use, fast, and stable. No crashes and I can instantly see my PR4100 from anywhere in the world, move files, rename things, and even change basic setup parameters. In just about every way I like WD’s app better than the ones I use for Synology devices.

Streaming and Transcoding: What can I say? This thing is unstoppable. I ripped a handful of movies off my Blu Ray disks to MKV format, dropped them on the PR4100, setup Plex (SO EASY) and was streaming movies to test. I tested on an Apple TV with Plex, an iPhone 6s Plus, an iPad Pro, and a MacBook AT THE SAME TIME with four different movies, all transcoding and playing in real time at 1080p. I would fast forward on one device while my wife did the same on another: nothing to report. I didn’t even notice an INSTANT of hesitation. Unbelievable.

For fun, I also streamed the SAME MOVIE to four different devices at the same time: same result. No slow down, everything worked flawlessly.

I tested simulated power failure: the PR4100 notified me of the power interruption nearly instantly and came back up as soon as the power came back on. Very nice.

I also tested drive failure by pulling a drive out of Bay 1 without warning. Again, instant notification from the PR4100. Once a new drive was inserted, the PR4100 immediately began rebuilding and finished about 20 minutes later with another notification to let me know everything was normal again.

For fun (I need to get out more), I also decided to move a massive amount of data to the PR4100 just to see how it performed while REALLY crunching. To test, I SSH’ed (for novices, a secure command line connection directly to the PR4100 not using the web-based interface) in to the NAS, changed directories, and then RSYNC’ed (a way of mirroring two different directories) the PR4100 with 1.65 TERAbytes of data across a few hundred thousand files I had stored on an older Synology I brought home from work to test this with. The process started and ran for 27 hours straight (which is actually pretty darn fast). During that time we watched movies, we moved files, we snapped photos with phones and watched the photos sync to the PR4100, we ran Time Machine backups… We did everything we would have normally done and the CPU never showed higher than 50% usage. Again, flawless.

The WD Red drives I used in this are at the top of my list for use in ANY NAS. We use them within my office by the case load. Stick with these; you’ll find they are usually well-priced, resilient, super-quiet, and very fast.

I’m giving the WD PR4100 5 stars. It’s the total package, and it’s just easy enough to use that even non-Pros could get one and work their way through some basic setup tasks to have a secure, private storage device and screaming-fast media streamer. In the age of constant data loss by mega corporations, we love having our computers, movies, photos, music, and every other bit and byte securely placed within our own walls. Well done, Western Digital Team!

If you’ve read the review and are thinking of getting a NAS but feel like you need some basic setup help, or just have other questions or want me to test something on the PR4100 for you, reach out via the comments and I’d be happy to do so. Also happy to gran pictures from other angles, vidoes, etc.

Finally, if you made it this far down in the review: Thanks for reading! :-)

Top critical review

1.0 out of 5 starsDisappointed about spending so much money for a solution that ...

Reviewed in the United States on March 14, 2018

Our business got this NAS device as a replacement to our mac mini (with Mac OS X server) with an OWC 4 bay external RAID hard drive enclosure. The OWC worked without a problem for over 4 years, and was only replaced as the connected mac needed to be retired.

The OS on the WD 8TB MyCloud Pro PR4100 is very flakey and definitely not meant to be used in a small office environment where reliability is important. User accounts stop working for AFP (apple file sharing) after a few days, and the users have to be deleted and set up again. No logs or debugging info is available unfortunately.

Tech support in India is not helpful either. After spending over an hour describing the LEDs statuses, rebooting, and doing all other kinds of suggested shot-in-the-dark kind of triaging, the issue still isn't resolved.

Disappointed about spending so much money for a solution that is a failure from the beginning.

I’ve just spent 40+ days putting the PR4100 through its paces in a good variety of tests including basic NAS functions (with comparisons to similar Synology devices), transcoding stress tests, power failure simulation, simulated drive failure recovery, formatting and RAID changes, connecting from Macs (including Time Machine), PCs and iOS devices, moving massive amounts of data to and from the device using a variety of methods (RSYNC, FTP, WD myCloud), testing the apps, etc.

The ‘too long, didn’t read’ version: Western Digital has put together an extremely solid NAS offering that should sit at the top of any home and/or small business’s shopping list. Strengths include serious streaming horsepower, ease of use, and Western Digital reliability and reputation. It’s not completely up to Synology’s level in terms of features and apps (yet), but the hardware transcoding is the best I’ve ever seen and my bet is this platform is going to get continue to evolve. If I had to buy a new NSA today, it would be a seriously tough call and the transcoding might be the deciding factor.

Quick Review Note: I was offered a 32TB version of the PR4100 for review and was sent a 16TB version. This has no effect on anything in my review, but felt like I should note it anyway.

Setting up the PR4100 is cake! It comes out of the box ready for action… slide the drives in, plug it in to a reliable UPS, hit the power button and navigate to the local IP to start setup.

The PR4100 has tons of config options, and you can get as detailed as you’d like. I chose to go take a few extra minutes and get some of the basic setup tasks out of the way to make using the NAS easier by creating volumes I wanted to use to segregate files and people, creating user accounts, enabling cloud file access for myself, making sure basic security was adhered to (changing default ports, etc.), switching on SSH and FTP, giving the NAS a reservation on my home network (powered by Eeros), etc.

All-in I spent about 15 minutes looking through options and getting it ‘just right’. For many, many users of this NAS, you can skip much of what I did since most of the default config options are good enough to get novice users going quickly.

One commenter mentioned needing to change the PR4100 to RAID5 from RAID0. I didn’t not have to do this, mine came out of the box in RAID5. For those of you who don’t want to learn about RAID setups, just make sure your NAS (if it’s the PR4100) is set to RAID5. This will ensure you get plenty of drive space (3 of your 4 drives added together is how much space you’ll have) and that if a drive goes bad you can swap it out and not lose data.

Also, RAID is not a backup strategy. If you have a NAS, it still needs to be backed up! You can do this with multiple services today… I am doing a simple over-the-internet backup to Amazon S3. It’s not fast, but it works flawlessly (and in the background) and ensures my NAS is completely backed up in case of fire/flood/etc. If you want to set this up and are unsure how, leave a comment and I’ll see if I can’t help you.

We have Macs in our house (aside from one lonely PC), and the PR4100 accepted TimeMachine backups from both of them without breaking a sweat. With this much space, this thing is the ultimate TimeCapsule for Apple laptops. With WD’s app, you can also backup photos from your iOS or Android right to the PR4100 - pretty cool stuff.

The WD app is also easy to use, fast, and stable. No crashes and I can instantly see my PR4100 from anywhere in the world, move files, rename things, and even change basic setup parameters. In just about every way I like WD’s app better than the ones I use for Synology devices.

Streaming and Transcoding: What can I say? This thing is unstoppable. I ripped a handful of movies off my Blu Ray disks to MKV format, dropped them on the PR4100, setup Plex (SO EASY) and was streaming movies to test. I tested on an Apple TV with Plex, an iPhone 6s Plus, an iPad Pro, and a MacBook AT THE SAME TIME with four different movies, all transcoding and playing in real time at 1080p. I would fast forward on one device while my wife did the same on another: nothing to report. I didn’t even notice an INSTANT of hesitation. Unbelievable.

For fun, I also streamed the SAME MOVIE to four different devices at the same time: same result. No slow down, everything worked flawlessly.

I tested simulated power failure: the PR4100 notified me of the power interruption nearly instantly and came back up as soon as the power came back on. Very nice.

I also tested drive failure by pulling a drive out of Bay 1 without warning. Again, instant notification from the PR4100. Once a new drive was inserted, the PR4100 immediately began rebuilding and finished about 20 minutes later with another notification to let me know everything was normal again.

For fun (I need to get out more), I also decided to move a massive amount of data to the PR4100 just to see how it performed while REALLY crunching. To test, I SSH’ed (for novices, a secure command line connection directly to the PR4100 not using the web-based interface) in to the NAS, changed directories, and then RSYNC’ed (a way of mirroring two different directories) the PR4100 with 1.65 TERAbytes of data across a few hundred thousand files I had stored on an older Synology I brought home from work to test this with. The process started and ran for 27 hours straight (which is actually pretty darn fast). During that time we watched movies, we moved files, we snapped photos with phones and watched the photos sync to the PR4100, we ran Time Machine backups… We did everything we would have normally done and the CPU never showed higher than 50% usage. Again, flawless.

The WD Red drives I used in this are at the top of my list for use in ANY NAS. We use them within my office by the case load. Stick with these; you’ll find they are usually well-priced, resilient, super-quiet, and very fast.

I’m giving the WD PR4100 5 stars. It’s the total package, and it’s just easy enough to use that even non-Pros could get one and work their way through some basic setup tasks to have a secure, private storage device and screaming-fast media streamer. In the age of constant data loss by mega corporations, we love having our computers, movies, photos, music, and every other bit and byte securely placed within our own walls. Well done, Western Digital Team!

If you’ve read the review and are thinking of getting a NAS but feel like you need some basic setup help, or just have other questions or want me to test something on the PR4100 for you, reach out via the comments and I’d be happy to do so. Also happy to gran pictures from other angles, vidoes, etc.

Finally, if you made it this far down in the review: Thanks for reading! :-)

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4GB RAM works fine for this device.Configured as Raid 5 – once the disk system builds it is very fastSo far very reliable

Cons

There is no logging of user access to the device.

There appears to be no security when attaching an external drive. Guest logon can access the external drive.

The support line is horrendously bad. I am not sure there are many people there. The ‘Bots’ pick a problem they know how to fix and provide a solution – regardless of what was reported. However, I did get a human being on the line after emailing a detailed description of my issue – this person consulted level 2 and provided me with a fix. The fix was wrong, which can happen. I sent WD a note explaining how the problem was solved – so they could add it to their knowledge base. I received a note back saying they were glad their fix worked. Not sure what planet I was calling but I am sure it wasn’t Earth.

Conclusion

This appears to be a solid piece of hardware. I purchased this device to support my ‘retreat’ from social media sites and cloud storage services, which have become far too intrusive. We store ‘family’ photos, videos, and documents here, which effectively shuts out Facebook, Google etc. It appears to be a good solution.

The device is on a UPS with the cable modem, security gateway, wireless router etc. Disk subsystems do better with a consistent power supply.

I think it is important for WD to improve the visibility into device access in the future. I would definitely buy this again even with the ‘Cons.’

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again WD does not disappoint! I have been using WD products for almost 9 years, started with a 4TB nas, and upgraded to the 16TB, and now to the 32TB. The one I got from amazon I had to return it because the power source didn't work, so got it directly from Western digital. Love the backup pics feature, love that I can move files around to different shares with one tap on my phone, and the fact that I can stream video from anywhere in the world I have a connection. Plus I stream within my house to 2 appleTV4's, 2 iPads, and 4 phones. This NAS is just spectacular! if I could give it 10 stars I would. I didn't take a star off for it, but in the technical specifications it says there are 3 USB ports but I only see 2. Other than that the product is flawless!

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Has worked excellently for my prosumer (but admittedly not professional) needs. I mainly store large quantities of photos and video - including 22 MP jpegs, 1080p videos of various types, and others, and it has faithfully stored and retrieved them without complaint over gigabit ethernet. I have not had any instances of stuttering or delayed load times even when handling bandwidth-intensive files like 1080p video. I have not done 4k video to test.

User interface is simple, powerful, and elegant over standard webpage. All necessary commands and information are available at a glance - including very advanced options if you have such a need. One of my main concerns was ability to back-up to an external hard drive for redundancy, and in this regards the transfer is quick and easy.

Noise is minimal except for startup, fans never seemed to go above 540 rpm, and are whisper quiet. LCD readout provides basic but useful info. Drives have worked without complaint so far this past 6 months. Device never seems to overheat or require restarting.

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I am using this NAS mostly as Plex server.Installation was straight forward. The only part that took some time was getting the IP address. I had to physically remove the cable and reset the cable while the NAS was running to force it into DHCP request to get the right IP.Since the installation it works. Streaming is no problem on several devices at the same time including a 4k stream.One thing that is very unusual is the upload speed from my local network. Normally I can easily reach 40MB/s, however sometimes it just slows down to 1-2MB/s without any visible reason. Did not happen for the last week since the last PLEX update, so maybe it was the PLEX version (although uploads do not have anything to do with Plex, it is just simple file upload.I use 4x8TB WD Red drives.Noise is low, but load enough to hear it working.Very unusual to have external power adapters... but it is just question of space.Over I recommend this NAS as Plex server.

The unit was purchased to be used as a Plex file server. I received a diskless unit 3 days ago. The unit was populated with 3 4TB drives and set up as Raid 5. Setup was straight forward and easy. I was unprepared for the time involved. Formating the disks took close to an hour. I was immediately notified that a firmware up date was avilable. After the disks were formatted the unit entered a "checking disk parity" state which ran in the background for 21 hours. The firmware update could not be done during the parity check. There was a notification that performance was slowed by the "checking disk parity". I installed Plex from the list of available built in programs.

Uploading files to the unit from my Win10 pc sounded simple enough except that the instructions in the user manual (which I downloaded from WD) were outdated. I discovered a program from WD called "WD access" which I downloaded to my PC which allowed me to map the PR4100 to file manager. After that I was able to begin uploading my 4tbs of movie and music files to the built in public share of the PR4100. This took approximately 5 hours. Do not make the mistake of having Plex update your movie library while you are uploading files. That slows things to a crawl. Plex took about 15 hours to update the music and movie file libraries after the files were uploaded.

During the time Plex was updating its libraries, I received a major update to Win10 on my PC which when installed invalidated the file manager link to the server. The "WD access" program no longer allowed mapping. Turns out WD is aware of this and has easy instructions on how to map the server to file manager.

Now that every thing is up and running the unit performs lawlessly. I am able to access Plex from all my devices, smart TV, ipad, Amazon fire, etc. I tested the unit from an out of network location on a public WiFi using my Fire tablet. Transcoding took about 15 seconds and then the movie began to play. No buffering!

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I upgraded to this from a WD EX4 and setup was a breeze. I was able to just swap the drives from the old unit into the new one, boot it up, and it detected the array and re-configured it quickly with no loss of data. Just a few tweaks of hostname and IP and my network never even knew the difference!The UI is easy to use and the CPU is powerful enough that I migrated my Plex server from my ESXi host to the NAS itself and it doesn't even flinch.You can also set up NFS support and use it as an NFS file store for an ESXi host as well (Which is why I upgraded to it). I'm not sure I would trust it for a Production-grade NAS device (I've had a couple times where it appears to have frozen and required a reboot, usually immediately after a firmware upgrade) but for my home lab setup, it's an amazing device.

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immediately attracted by dual PSU ports on the back (19v laptop dc barrels). has dual ethernet but not sure if that is for 2 subnets or if its really bonded and internally 'teamed'. it runs linux from the vendor and it updated over the net fine as long as you have a drive installed with free space (took me a while to figure out that a driveless system can't be re-flashed; has to have a drive installed). I'm trying out the various modes (span, raid, jbod) but it seems to work ok, has a nice lcd display (for ip addr and such), its not noisy, it has a 'real' cpu and ram slots inside and the web interface is usable. does NOT need to be part of a public cloud and does NOT need to register with a public system. can run normal NFS just fine. so far, this is a great unit. got mine from warehouse deals, used, with a rattling screw inside but easily fixed :) price was worth trying out and so far, looks like a keeper.

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had this for about a year now and very happy with it. I installed (4) 4 TB WD NAS drives on it and left the stock 4gig of ram. I would definately suggest getting NAS rated drives. they arent that much more and are much more reliable. you can setup the NAS as a basic volume or add one of a few different flavors of RAID to it. I am running RAID5 for speed and fault tolerance. that said, dont rely on that to keep data safe. a simple, cheap usb drive for backups will keep catastrophic failures from being permanent ones.

The NAS is very quick. I have run 3 simultaneous movies and it didnt slow down a bit. I was uploading movies, watching a movie and doing a full backup at the same time yesterday and never a hiccup. CPU was reporting about 60% use.

I am running a plex server on it and other than a few issues related to plex itself, the NAS performs flawlessly. setup an outside port from my router and I can stream music or movies on any device inside or outside my home network. Of course outside is dependant on upload speed of your internet. dont expect 4k streaming with only a 10meg upload speed. if you do stream higher than your internet can handle, this thing shines at that too. the transcoding engine does an amazing job of seemless coding. You honestly cant tell it is doing it and it does it in real time.

I like all the options for network connection. I have one ethernet port for general use on my network and the other one is a dedicated port for the TV. although I am not sure it matters. with 10gig ports, you wont have an issue as long as your TV and router supports it.

I also like the redundant power connections. buy an extra power brick and if one ever goes TU on you, it will keep going and alert you that one of the power sources died.

All the setup and management pages are done through a built in web server. even if you arent experienced you can have this up and running in 15 minutes.

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I purchased one of these at the recommendation of our in-house IT guy after he installed an EX4100 in our office earlier this year. He preferred the PR4100 because of the Intel processor. Installation of the two WD30EFRX Red 3 TB hard drives was a snap and setup was a breeze. I have mine configured in RAID 1 and will probably add 2 more drives in the future. Setting up user accounts and Cloud access was easy and it's nice to be able to access files remotely.